"Amen," Althea husked. She strained to repress tears.

You were right about him, Grandpere.

-You never seriously doubted it, did you?

No. But...never mind. You were right.

She ignited the main drive, waited for the drive's throaty roar to build to its peak, released the brakes and shoved the throttle to the six percent mark.

Althea's nerves tautened as the Relic loomed ahead. The rough, heavily pitted surface was exactly as she'd imagined it. Sunlight glittered from its many protrusions and pooled in the depressions among them.

"Dear God," Martin breathed. "I'd never have imagined it."

"Imagined what?" Althea said.

"How beautiful it is."

She grinned. "Have you ever seen it with a Spacehawk laser shining on it?"

"A couple of times...they stopped doing that a few years ago, didn't they?"

"I asked them to," Althea said. "You'll see why in a second."

Here we go. Slow and steady, babe. No sudden moves or sharp maneuvers. Treat the controls as if they were made of spun glass. But no pressure. It's only death by vacuum asphyxiation or re-entry incineration if you mess up.

She played the retrojets carefully as she nosed Freedom's Horizon toward the planetoid. It would be next to impossible to match their orbital speeds exactly, but she'd counted on close being good enough. The spaceplane's magnetic grapples were strong enough to absorb the transverse stress from a small difference...for some values of small, anyway.

Grandpere? Are you still in touch?

There came no answer.

Grandpere? Althea calling from sperosynchronous orbit. If you're home, pick up the mike!

Still nothing.

Oh well.

A gleaming protrusion from the planetoid's surface was enlarging slowly in their vision.

"What's that...whatever?" Martin said.

"Oh, that? You remember when I decreed that the collar of the umbilicus had to be reconfigurable in real time?"

He looked at her and nodded uncertainly.

"That's the reason."

"Hm?"

"It's the egress dock of the Spoonerites, and from here it looks as if it should still be in working order."

The speed difference dropped near to zero as Freedom's Horizon moved into position over the dock. Althea took a deep breath and triggered the grapples.

The magnetic heads shot smoothly through space. At first contact, they fixed themselves to the nickel-iron planetoid in perfect symmetry around the dock. The nanoengineered flexosteel cables that attached them to Freedom's Horizon tightened and arrested the spaceplane over the dock with only a slight rebound. Althea killed the retrojets, turned to her husband, and sighed explosively.

"We're here."

The Spoonerite dock's outer hatch was closed with a rotary pressure latch. No demand for access codes or other security measures impeded their access.

I guess they weren't worried about being boarded.

Althea put a hand to the latch wheel, then thought better of it.

"Aren't we going in?"

"In a minute, Martin," she said. "I'd like to look a little more closely at the mating ring."

A couple of inches of the ring were inside the umbilicus's docking collar. She put her gloved fingertips to the gleaming surface and trailed them along it. The steel appeared to be smooth and blemish-free.

Good steel. Nice workmanship. They might not have known how to make flexosteel, but they certainly did well enough with what they had. I wonder if they feared they might have to re-embark some day?

Doesn't matter. I'm still never going through this tube without a pressure suit and helmet on.

She took the latch wheel in both hands and turned it counterclockwise. The hatch unlocked after three full turns and swung open without undue effort.

"Remarkable," Martin murmured.

She nodded. "Makes me hopeful."

"About what?"

"A lot of things."

They knew they'd be here for a really long time. They had to have made provisions for long periods of little or no maintenance.

Beyond the outer hatch lay an airlock space and an inner hatch of identical design. Once she and Martin were entirely within it, she closed the outer hatch, tightened it down fully, and turned to the inner one. It, too, opened without incident.

The chamber beyond was wide, high, and pitch black. Their suit lights showed smooth walls, two lines of elaborate hooks, and a couple of flat, uncushioned benches driven into the nickel-iron. A pair of wide-mouthed tunnels at the back of the chamber led deeper into the planetoid.

She gestured Martin through the hatch, entered behind him, closed the hatch and tightened it down with great care.

A capacitive solenoid patch on the wall to the left of the hatch caught Althea's eye. She brushed a gloved finger across it and a series of muted lights lit, stretching from the chamber down both of the tunnels.

"How did you know to do that?" Martin said.

"I didn't."

It was illumination enough that they could douse their suit lights.

Thirteen centuries and change, and their electric network is still sound. There must be at least one reactor that's still generating power.

"Al," Martin said, "take a look at this."

"Hm?" She left off her examination of the chamber and turned to her husband.

Martin was staring fixedly at a pressure gauge. He had good reason; it showed a gas pressure of 955 millibars.

"There's air in here?"

"Maybe," he said. He dipped his gloved fingers into a pouch at his hip, pulled out a pair of test strips, and flicked the activating nodes. Less than a minute later they had the answer.

"Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer," she breathed. "I'd never have believed it without seeing it."

They really did do good work.

"I'm a little reluctant to trust it," Martin said.

"Good," she said. "I'm a lot reluctant. Let's have a look around."

They entered the right-hand tunnel, moving slowly and carefully in the microgravity of the planetoid, taking care not to brush their suits against the walls. The body of the tunnel narrowed only slightly past its entrance.

They'd been gliding forward for perhaps ten minutes and had covered about four hundred yards when the tunnel opened onto a chamber many times as large as the one at the dock. One look at its contents sufficed to explain its function.

The chamber housed an air plant: a hydroponically sustained jungle of various Earth flora. The tanks from which the plants fed gurgled gently as hidden pumps and impellers circulated nutrient fluids around their roots.

The aisles among the tanks were narrower than the tunnels, but still wide enough to pass a pressure-suited human figure. Althea and Martin walked carefully among them, marveling at the profusion of plant life. Althea tried to count the number of different species they saw. There were many she had never before seen and could not identify. She gave up well before she could reach three digits.

"That's how you create a stable habitat," Martin said. "You borrow from the one you already know and love. Heavily. There's enough greenery in here to fill out a good-sized arboretum.

Althea caught a flash of contrasting colors in the midst of one bundle of greens and bent for a closer look.

"Spooner's beard," she murmured. "Martin, have a look at this."

He joined her at the edge of the tank, crouched to peer in as she had, and his eyebrows rose.

"Are those carrots?"

"Either carrots or a really cleverly disguised alien invader, just waiting for his chance to strike," she said. "And looky there: yams. There are beets right over there. And damned if that cluster isn't hiding pea pods!"

They straightened, looked at one another, and burst simultaneously into giggles.

"Well," Martin said as they ran down, "I guess we know what's for dinner."

"Live on concentrates, my ass," Althea said. "Think we should tell 'em groundside?"

"Bite your tongue," Martin said. "Let them go on thinking that we're suffering nobly. Besides, we don't have nearly enough plates and utensils to invite them all."

They found a chamber a little off the main inward tunnel that had once been a living quarters, and another that would make a serviceable lab area. Unshipping their gear took several hours, as their chosen spaces were a good distance into the bowels of the Relic.

They were supremely careful with the medipods. Though effectively weightless, they massed the same as on Hope; the momentum they acquired from being carried demanded continuous respect. Althea steered them into a smaller chamber near to their chosen bedroom area and set them down with reverence.

When all was accomplished, they doffed their helmets and tasted the air of their home-to-be. Contrary to all expectations, it was sweet and fresh, with no hint of must from the planetoid's long abandonment, and only slightly thinner than at sea level on Hope.

"I can't get over it," Althea said. "Thirteen hundred years, and it's still friendly to life."

"The Spoonerites clearly did good work," Martin said. "They knew it would be a long time before they'd found a new home, so they built their life-support systems to last. But I'll bet they never imagined that their facilities would still be serviceable this long after they abandoned them."

Maybe they did. Grandpere said Hope was their first deceleration. They might have feared they'd be in space for several millennia. Or that their descendants would.

"A dream of freedom," she murmured.

"Hm?"

"That was the name they gave the Relic after they'd converted her into a starship." Althea waved nonspecifically at their surroundings. "A Dream Of Freedom. They packed thousands of people into this rock. People whose only wish was to be free. People who were willing to take the biggest gamble in all of history for a slim chance that their distant posterity would live in freedom." She swallowed. "People a lot braver and tougher than anyone groundside could imagine, despite all the Sacrifice Day stories. They'd have to come up here and see this even to get an inkling."

And something like a hundred times as many died willingly, just to give them that chance.

"We're...not worthy."

Martin looked at her in puzzlement.

"How so?"

She grimaced and sat on the edge of their bed.

"What Bart said last night," she said. "The Spoonerites-the original ones-lost everything. They had to know that all their work and struggle would bring them nothing. Them personally, I mean. It was all for their children, and their children's children, and so on. But they gave it all willingly. The ones who boarded this rock and converted it into Man's first interstellar vessel, and the ones who died to cover their escape. We've enjoyed the fruits of their sacrifices gratis, and for so long that few of us have even the vaguest idea what it's like not to be free. We hear the stories, and we toast their memory...but we don't really know."

Her husband nodded, eyes solemn.

"What's that word again, love?" she said. "The one that means a holy place that's preserved and protected because it's attached to the memory of a sacred event?"

"A shrine."

She waved around them again. "That's what this is, or should be."

Martin crouched, took her hands, and raised her to her feet.

"We'll make ourselves worthy," he said. "We'll use what they left us to go further. We'll give Man the freedom of the stars, and more knowledge than he can amass confined to a single world. If we have relatives somewhere, we'll find them, and let them know that they're not alone in the universe." He grinned. "And God willing, we won't have to die to do it."

Althea returned the grin. "Or live on concentrates."

"Well, yes, that too."